Tag: open source

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Blender in 2021

The Blender Foundation have just announced their “Big Projects” list for Blender in 2021. It is hard to argue that 2020 wasn’t a banner year for Blender development, with three major releases as well as the first ever LTS release. Through 2020 we saw improvements to the Blender UI/UX, sculpting tools, modeling, EEVEE, Cycles and so much more. We also saw a record number of massive companies coming on board the Blender development fund. With the release today of the projects list, we get insight into the Blender priorities in 2021, including priorities such as:

  • launch of a new open movie called Sprite Fight
  • the everything nodes project, where everything in Blender will be able to be driven procedurally using nodes (see Geometry Nodes in action here)
  • all new Asset Browsers editor window for better content management
  • massive improvements to the VSE or Video Sequence Editor
  • EEVEE real-time rendering improvements including Vulkan support, motion blur, depth of field and possibly raytracing
  • VR improvements including the ability to use VR controllers and author content in virtual reality
  • Cycles rendering improvements especially related to perfromance
  • Animation 22 (previously Animation 2020), an effort to improve animation tools in Blender, sponsored by AWS
  • improved pipeline and USD support, Pixar’s open interchange format

You can learn more about the Blender’s accomplishments in 2020, as well as the new projects in 2021 in the video below.

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Raylib 3.5 Released

Eight months after the release of Raylib 3.0, Raylib 3.5 was just released. Raylib is an open source cross platform C/C++ game framework. Raylib runs on a ton of different platforms and has bindings available for more than 50 different programming languages. The Raylib 3.5 release brings the following new features.

  • NEW Platform supported: Raspberry Pi 4 native mode (no X11 windows) through DRM subsystem and GBM API. Actually this is a really interesting improvement because it opens the door to raylib to support other embedded platforms (Odroid, GameShell, NanoPi…). Also worth mentioning the un-official homebrew ports of raylib for PS4 and PSVita.
  • NEW configuration options exposed: For custom raylib builds, config.h now exposes more than 150 flags and defines to build raylib with only the desired features, for example, it allows to build a minimal raylib library in just some KB removing all external data filetypes supported, very useful to generate small executables or embedded devices.
  • NEW automatic GIF recording feature: Actually, automatic GIF recording (CTRL+F12) for any raylib application has been available for some versions but this feature was really slow and low-performant using an old gif library with many file-accesses. It has been replaced by a high-performant alternative (msf_gif.h) that operates directly on memory… and actually works very well! Try it out!
  • NEW RenderBatch system: rlgl module has been redesigned to support custom render batches to allow grouping draw calls as desired, previous implementation just had one default render batch. This feature has not been exposed to raylib API yet but it can be used by advance users dealing with rlgl directly. For example, multiple RenderBatch can be created for 2D sprites and 3D geometry independently.
  • NEW Framebuffer system: rlgl module now exposes an API for custom Framebuffer attachments (including cubemaps!). raylib RenderTexture is a basic use-case, just allowing color and depth textures, but this new API allows the creation of more advance Framebuffers with multiple attachments, like the G-Buffers. GenTexture*() functions have been redesigned to use this new API.
  • Improved software rendering: raylib Image*() API is intended for software rendering, for those cases when no GPU or no Window is available. Those functions operate directly with multi-format pixel data on RAM and they have been completely redesigned to be way faster, specially for small resolutions and retro-gaming. Low-end embedded devices like microcontrollers with custom displays could benefit of this raylib functionality!
  • File loading from memory: Multiple functions have been redesigned to load data from memory buffers instead of directly accessing the files, now all raylib file loading/saving goes through a couple of functions that load data into memory. This feature allows custom virtual-file-systems and it gives more control to the user to access data already loaded in memory (i.e. images, fonts, sounds…).
  • NEW Window states management system: raylib core module has been redesigned to support Window state check and setup more easily and also before/after Window initialization, SetConfigFlags() has been reviewed and SetWindowState() has been added to control Window minification, maximization, hidding, focusing, topmost and more.
  • NEW GitHub Actions CI/CD system: Previous CI implementation has been reviewed and improved a lot to support multiple build configurations (platforms, compilers, static/shared build) and also an automatic deploy system has been implemented to automatically attach the diferent generated artifacts to every new release. As the system seems to work very good, previous CI platforms (AppVeyor/TravisCI) have been removed.

Release notes are available here and a complete change log is available here. Binary versions of Raylib are available on Raylib.com while the source code is hosted under the ZLib license on GitHub. If you are interested in learning Raylib you can check out their community on Discord. You can also download Raylib via vcpkg on Visual Studio with step by step instructions available here. You can learn more about Raylib and the 3.5 release in the video below.

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GDevelop Game Engine Revisted

We first looked at the GDevelop game engine back in 2017 in our Closer Look Game Engine series. In the intervening years, GDevelop 5 has come a long way, bringing more and more features to this impressive open source cross platform 2D game engine. In the past year there have been over a dozen new beta releases to the engine including several community contributions. There have also been some updates as a result of the 2020 Google Summer of Code. While many of these releases aren’t large enough to justify a video, taken as a whole it is certainly time to revisit this game engine and the improvements it has seen.

Some of the highlights of recent releases include:

  • add support for a new asset store with hundreds of ready made game objects
  • new analytics system without requiring a third party solution
  • better support for right to left languages
  • support for dynamic 2D lights
  • customizable keyboard shortcuts
  • peer to peer communication extension
  • live preview (hot reloading) support
  • command palette for quickly launching editors
  • new editor themes

These are just a few highlights of the dozens of releases over the last few months. If you are interested in checking out GDevelop it’s available for Windows, Mac, Linux and Online. It is also an open source project with the source code available on GitHub under the MIT open source license. If you want to learn more or run into problems, be sure to check out their Discord server. You can learn more about GDevelop and see it in action in the video below.

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Beepbox Easy Online Music Sketching Application

Beepbox is a free online tool for quickly generating music via sketching. It’s written in a combination of JavaScript and TypeScript with the source code available on GitHub under the very permissive MIT license. Getting started with Beepbox is as simple as going to the website and starting to lay down some notes. There are a variety of instruments available and you can layer multiple tracks of sounds to easily create music.

Perhaps coolest of all, as you create your song, the song’s data is encoded into the URL. You can simply share your songs URL and others can either open it in the player or they can open it in the editor and make changes. You can also download your song in .mid or .json formats for later updating, or you can export out into WAV format for use in your game engine of choice. In addition to BeepBox is there a modified more complex version called ModBox you can check out here. It is forked from the same source code but offers additional tools and levels of control at the cost of complexity.

You can learn more about BeepBox and see it in action in the video below.

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City Generator Hands-On

City Generator is a free and open-source procedural generation tool for creating American-style grid based cities. The source code is available on GitHub under the GPL 3 license, composed almost entirely of TypeScript code.

Features of City Generator include:

  • .png download
  • .png heightmap download
  • .svg download
  • .stl download
  • Several colour themes including Google Maps, Apple Maps, and hand-drawn styles
  • Pseudo-3D buildings
  • Open source

City Generator can export STL files that can then be imported into a 3D tool of choice for creating 3D levels. We should this process in Blender as well as the process of generating a city in City Generator in the video below.

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Facebook Joins Blender as Corporate Sponsor

Today Blender announced that Facebook would be joining the Blender Development Fund as a Corporate Sponsor. A corporate sponsor is the highest tier of sponsorship and means at least 120K euro per year in financial support, which generally gets translated as two full time developers on the project. Facebook will be joining the likes of Unity, Epic Games, AMD and NVIDIA in the corporate supporter tier.

Details from the Blender announcement:

To support these artists and the countless other animators, researchers, engineers, designers and content creators who depend on open source tools, Facebook wishes to contribute to the development of Blender. Which is why we’re proud to announce that Facebook will join the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a Corporate Patron as of Q4, 2020.  

We at Blender see this as another important signal of the industry’s willingness to migrate to open source, and contribute to open source’s continual improvement.

Ton Roosendaal,
Chairman Blender Foundation

Facebook currently use Blender in their AR product Spark AR Studio in addition to their ownership of Oculus. If you are worried about the corporate influence on Blender, don’t worry about it, for reasons described in this video. If you want to learn more about Facebooks support for Blender be sure to check out the video below.

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GIMP 2.99.2 Released

GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, just released version 2.99.2 beta, a giant step toward the upcoming 3.0 release. The heart of this update is the move to the GTK 3 UI toolkit from the existing GTK2 version. This has many advantages, especially when it comes to increasingly common HiDPI devices.

Highlights of the 2.99.2 release include:

  • GTK3 based user interface, with native support for Wayland and HiDPI displays.
  • Major refactoring and cleanup
  • New plug-in API
  • Plugins now possible with Python 3, JavaScript, Lua, and Vala
  • More (color) space invasion
  • Render caching available for better performance

Be sure to check the complete release notes for further details on this release. You can also learn more about the 2.99.2 release and see GIMP in action in the video below.

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LDtk The Level Designer Toolkit

LDtk, or Level Designer Toolkit, is an open source MIT licensed Haxe based 2D level editor from the creator of Dead Cells. If it looks familiar that is because we recently covered it when it was known as LEd. In just a few short months though, LDtk has come a long way, including community ports to Linux and MacOS. With the 0.5 release (the re-brand version number), tons of new features were added to LDtk including:

  • Tiles flipping: in Tile Layers, you can mirror tiles before painting them by pressing X or Y (or Z). This also works from group of tiles.
  • Tiles stacking: you can now optionaly stack multiple tiles in a single cell of a Tile layer, reducing the need for multiple layers. For example, you could paint a brick wall, then enable stack mode (T), and add details like cracks or vines over the same wall. Be careful though: erasing of stacked elements can be tricky, so you should use a mix of multiple layers and stacking to get the best results.
  • New editing options bar: Grid locking, Single layer mode and Empty space selection moved to a new more streamlined button bar.
  • File association: project files now use the extension *.ldtk instead of *.json. Therefore, on Windows, double-clicking such files will open the app accordingly. If you prefer the .json extension, you can force it in each project settings (but will lose benefit of the file association).
  • Auto-layer rule preview: when you move your mouse over a rule, you will now see which cells in the current layer are affected, making their testing MUCH easier.
  • Tiled (TMX) export: this optional export now generates proper standard tile layers. However, to support LDtk stacked tiles feature (see above), multiple Tiled layers might be generated per single LDtk layer. Also, IntGrid layers are now properly exported to Tiled (as standard tile layers, with an auto-generated tileset image).
  • New color picker: it supports copy/paste, manual hex value editing and a much better UI (thanks to simple-color-picker).
  • Flood-fill fixes: if you hold SHIFT while clicking in a Tile layer, it will flood-fill the area using currently selected tiles (randomly, or by stamping group of tiles, depending on the current mode).
  • Flood-fill erasing: just use SHIFT+Right click to erase a whole contiguous area.
  • The layer Rule editor now overlaps left panel and allows level editing while being open (makes rule testing much easier). Press Escape to close it.
  • In Tile layers, you can press L to load a saved tileset selection (using S key)
  • Renamed the Level panel to World (for the 0.6.x future update).
  • It’s now possible to change the tileset or even the source layer of an Auto-Layer without loosing your rules.
  • Auto-layer baking: turn a complex Auto-Layer into a standard Tile layer (think of it as the flatten feature in Photoshop). Be careful, it’s a one-way operation.
  • Unified “Show/hide grid” and “Grid locking” options. You can now just press G to toggle grid (which also implies “grid locking” in supported layer types).
  • All options (such as “Grid on/off”, or “Compact panel mode”) are now saved to a JSON file in your app folder, in userSettings/.
  • Help window is now a side panel.
  • Opaque tiles are detected in tilesets for use in various optimizations (mostly related to the new tile stacking feature).
  • Fixed a crash when deleting IntGrid layer while an AutoLayer uses it as source.
  • Added some colors to UI buttons
  • New exit button icon.

You can learn more about LDtk releases here, including an even newer 0.5.1 beta release. As mentioned earlier the project is open source with the code released under the MIT license and available on GitHub. You can learn more about LDtk here with downloads available on Itch.io. You can learn more about LDtk and see it in action in the video below.

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Six Great Game Development YouTube Channels

YouTube is an incredible resource for game developers, but sorting the gems out can be a challenge. Today we are going to highlight 6 excellent game development channels, especially if you are a Godot developer, as well as general game development guides, Blender, GameMaker and more.

AskGameDev

AskGameDev is a collection of game developers that set out to answer your questions about game development. They cover many of aspects of gamedev that are often not covered, such as how to run a Kickstarter, how to get or deal with a publisher, as well as several game development themed compilations. AskGameDev also have a website available here.

GDQuest

GDQuest are home to dozens of Godot tutorials, in fact Nathan from GDQuest is a member of the Godot documentation team. In addition to Godot coverage, GDQuest has tutorials on all kinds of FOSS software such a Blender and Krita. The GDQuest website is available here.

HeartBeast

HeartBeast started out as a GameMaker tutorial channel, of which there are dozens of high quality long form tutorial series. In more recent years, Heartbeast has been instead creating high quality multipart and stand-alone tutorials on Godot. HeartBeast also has a website available here.

BornCG

BornCG has been making high quality Blender YouTube tutorials on his channel created in 2008! In more recent years BornCG has been increasingly covering the Godot game engine, as well as creating modern Blender tutorials as well.

DevDuck

DevDuck is the newest channel on this list, less than two year old and already over 100K subscribers, an impressive feat! DevDuck is a professional developer that is documenting his indie game development experience on the side. He started off with Unity but switched to Godot and of course did videos explaining why and how.

KidsCanCode

KidsCanCode have the project mission to get kids started in coding as young as possible, often through the process of creating games. Early on they did mostly Python and PyGame tutorials but then switched to Godot in recent years. They also run the Godot Recipes on their site, a collection of snippets on how to accomplish specific tasks in Godot and GDScript.

You can learn more about all the above channels in the video below.

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ODIN 2 Synthesizer VST

Recently updated, today we are checking out the free and open source ODIN 2 synthesizer. It is built on top of the JUCE audio framework (also open source). ODIN 2 is described as:

Ever dreamt of a kickass synthesizer which is available on every platform? With a deep synthesis engine, endless modulation capabilities and it is literally for free? Look no further, Odin’s got you covered!

The sound of this 24-voice polyphonic beast will take you from your studio right to Valhalla. Earth shattering basses, exquisite leads or mad FX, Odin’s got them all! Use the classic sound of analog waveforms – or draw your own. High quality emulations of legendary analog filters like the Moog-ladder or the Korg-35 further shape your signal. Round your sound off with four onboard FX, or get crazy with modulation. There’s much to discover in Odin 2.

The source code for Odin 2 is available on GitHub under the GPL 3 open source license. Odin 2 is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux operating systems and is implemented as an VST compatible with most modern DAWs. If you are looking for a DAW to host Odin 2, check out our coverage on Reaper, LMMS, Mixcraft or ZRythm.

You can check out Odin 2 in action in the video below.